The Atlantic Monthly | September 2005

IN A RUINED COUNTRY

How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

BY D AVID S AMUELS

.....

The war for Jerusalem that began after Israeli Prime

Minister Ehud Barak's failed peace offer at Camp David in
the summer of 2000 has become the subject of legends and
fables, each one of which is colored in the distinctive
shades of the political spectrum from which it emerged:
Yasir Arafat tried to control the violence. Arafat was
behind the violence. Arafat was the target of the violence,
which he deflected onto the Israelis. Depending on which
day of the week it was, any combination of these statements
might have been true.

In his patchwork uniform, which combined a military tunic

with a traditional kaffiya, the Old Man, as those who had
known Yasir Arafat the longest called him, was a strange
and defiantly contradictory person. He was the father of
the Palestinian nation, and the successor to the Muslim
conquerors of Jerusalem, Omar Ibn al-Khattab and Saladin.
His official title was rais of the Palestinian Authority, a
title that is ambiguously translated as "chairman" or
"president." Arafat was also the chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah, the PLO's
central faction, which he founded in Kuwait in the late
1950s. The title that came first on his personal stationery
was head of Fatah, which means "conquest"—a backward
acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, the
Palestinian Liberation Movement. Spelled forward the
acronym yields "Hataf," which means "death."

Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his

conviction that history was moving in his favor: under
pressure from within and without, isolated in the world,
the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and
dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will
continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a
Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and
churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent
state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he
promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of
the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an
unfolding within the long duration of historical time
rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability
of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was
driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western
conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium
between competing interests.

Arafat's given name, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf

Arafat al-Kidwa al-Husseini, provides close readers with a
biography in brief of the man who created a nation out of
the Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The boy
Muhammad Abd al-Rahman was born in Cairo on August 24,
1929, and grew up in the city's Sakakini district. Both his
parents were Palestinians. His father, Abd al-Raouf, was a
merchant from Gaza. In the late 1920s Abd al-Raouf left
Gaza to prosecute a claim to a large chunk of Cairo that he
believed was the rightful property of his family. The claim
was futile, and preoccupied him until the day he died.
Arafat seldom mentioned his father and didn't attend his
funeral. His mother, Zahwa, for whom he named his only
child, was a daughter of the al-Saud family, whose home in
the Old City of Jerusalem was part of the neighborhood that
was bulldozed by the Israelis after the 1967 war to create
a plaza in front of the Western Wall. Although not born in
Jerusalem, as he often claimed, Arafat did live in the al-
Saud family house for several years with his brother Fathi
after his mother died, in 1933. Arafat's grandfather was
named Arafat, and his family name was al-Kidwa. His clan
was the al-Husseinis of Gaza, not the famous Jerusalem
family. "Arafat" was the only part of his given name that
he would carry into adulthood; "Yasir" was a childhood
nickname related to the word for "wealthy" or "easy." He
didn't like school, and showed an early talent for
organizing the neighborhood kids. "He formed them into
groups and made them march and drill," his sister Inam told
a biographer. "He carried a stick to beat those who did not
obey his commands. He also liked making camps in the garden
of our house."

It made sense that a people without a homeland, with only a

recent shared history of expulsion, flight, catastrophe,
shame, and defeat to bind them together, would fall under
Arafat's spell. He was famous for his mastery of al-taqiya,
the ability to dodge a threat, and of muamara, conspiracy.
Those who met him, even his intimates, inevitably described
themselves as rahba, awestruck. The man they met was
mutawaadi and baseet—humble and modest. As much as any
other man, Arafat was responsible for the making of the
modern Middle East. The raids he launched on Israel from
Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in the 1960s helped to
precipitate the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which stripped the
Arab regimes of their credibility and set the stage for
Arafat's emergence as the Arab Che Guevara. Arafat's
creation of a Palestinian para-state inside Lebanon in the
1970s made him a wealthy man, and a linchpin of Soviet
strategy in the region. Expelled from Beirut in 1982 by
Ariel Sharon, he went into exile in Tunis, where he watched
with surprise as a younger generation of Palestinians rose
up against the Israeli occupation in 1987. His support for
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War left him broke and
stripped of his political assets in the early nineties, and
out of touch with the young revolutionaries in the West
Bank and Gaza. In 1993 Arafat signed the Oslo Accords,
which committed Israel and the United States to a process
whose end point would be the establishment of a Palestinian
state. He returned to Gaza through Egypt on July 1, 1994.

In a largely traditional society Arafat stood out because

he was self-made, the symbolic incarnation of a people that
owed its continued existence to him. Decades before he
began to show his age in public, his lips trembling, his
hands shaking, his belly distended—even then he was known
as the Old Man. His speeches were laundry lists of slogans
and exhortatory phrases such as "Ya jabal ma yahzak reeh"
("O mountain, the wind cannot shake you!") and "Li-l-Quds
rayyihin, shuhada bi-l-malayyin" ("To Jerusalem we march,
martyrs by the millions") interspersed with Koranic verses.
The symbolic leader of the Palestinian nation spoke with a
pronounced Egyptian accent. His lips flapped when he spoke.
To some, the combination was irredeemably comic. He
distinguished himself within the Palestinian national
movement by his boundless energy for the cause, alqadhiya,
which might also be translated as "the case," a term
appropriate to a proceeding in a courtroom. One of the
peculiarities of the nation that Arafat created was that it
was founded on a festering grievance rather than any
positive imagination of the future; the worse things were
in the present, the stronger the Palestinian case became.

For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of

creating a new kind of political organization that would
rival the United States for global influence was burdened
by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust,
the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the
world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel
would become the Other of a utopian new world order that
would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and
particularistic passions.

Perhaps it was the clownish aspect of Arafat's behavior

that made it easy for the leaders of Israel, the United
States, and Europe to believe that Arafat was a minor
tribal chieftain whose true aim was to enjoy red-carpet
treatment during his visits to the White House and to other
seats of civilized government. The Palestinian leader was
fond of time-saving measures, and could cite the exact
number of hours that shaving once every five days, as he
did, could add to a man's life. He spent his spare hours
watching cartoons on television. His favorites were Road
Runner, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry. It took Arafat more
than an hour each morning to arrange the tail of his
kaffiya in the shape of Palestine and pin it to the
shoulder of one of his tunics, which his guards bought for
him in military-surplus stores in the cities they visited.
He completed his fanciful outfit with a pin in the shape of
a phoenix, symbolizing the rise of the Palestinian people
from the ash heap of history, along with a variety of
military ribbons and decorations that testified to his
self-appointed status as "the only undefeated general in
the Middle East." In ranks behind the decorations were
felt-tipped pens of different colors, to which court
gossips liked to attribute decisive significance. Green ink
was for his reports. Red ink meant that someone was to
receive a certain sum of money; or else red ink meant that
his signature was to be ignored. Inside the pockets of his
jacket were the small black notebooks in which he wrote
about money. When he was in doubt about a particular sum,
he would withdraw a notebook with a flourish, cite a
specific figure, and then put the notebook back in his
pocket. Inside the notebooks were the codes that unlocked
the secret bank accounts to which only he had access. When
his private plane went down in the Libyan desert in 1992
and could not be located for thirteen hours, a great and
memorable panic seized the leadership of the PLO at the
thought that the remnants of the organization's vast
financial empire had disappeared in the wreckage.

After Arafat died, on November 11, 2004, there were some

who believed that the chaos and violence that he had
brought with him to the Palestinian territories might
follow him to the grave, and that peace between Israelis
and Palestinians might finally be at hand. There were
others who noted the absence of any clear cause of death in
the voluminous files provided by the military hospital
south of Paris where he died. Some of his closest aides and
advisers spoke openly of their belief that he had been
poisoned. Suspects in the poisoning included the Israelis,
the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the
CIA, as well as a team of cyclists for peace who had
visited Arafat the previous September. Only the idea that
Arafat might have expired from natural causes was deemed
too farfetched for serious consideration.

There were also those among his closest aides who found the
discussion of the Old Man's death unseemly and distracting.
The Old Man was a great figure in history, they believed.
It was the Old Man who had created the Palestinian people
out of a host of miserable refugees. It was the Old Man who
had brought the Palestinians back to Palestine.

Several weeks after Arafat's death I visited the Muqata,

his compound in Ramallah, the West Bank city that serves as
the Palestinian capital. There I found groups of workmen
carrying garbage out of the ruined buildings as if they
were excavating the burrow of an animal. As I stood and
watched, a group of a hundred soldiers in matching brown
uniforms emerged from their barracks and stood more or less
at attention as they were inspected by a senior officer.
These are the faces of Palestine, I thought, the faces of
the conquerors and the conquered of the past thousand
years—sharp-featured Arabs, fierce-looking Turks, light-
skinned Europeans, dark-skinned Egyptian-looking soldiers
from Jericho and Gaza. In response to their officer's
command, they turned and faced a rubble-strewn field above
which hung a poster of Arafat in a Soviet overcoat, waving
good-bye. The Arabic motto on the poster read, "On Your Way
to Fulfill the Palestinian Dream." Behind him was the
golden dome of the Mosque of Omar.

THE BODYGUARD

In the weeks that follow Arafat's burial in the parking lot

of the Muqata, beneath an honor guard of transplanted olive
trees, members of Arafat's inner circle decide, one by one,
that it is important for his story to be told, and agree to
talk to me.
Awaiting their pleasure, I arrange to stay in a private
apartment in East Jerusalem that belongs to a friend, and
that is otherwise empty during the winter. In the mornings,
as I wait outside in the rain for a car to pick me up, I
watch the children walk to school—the boys holding hands
with boys, the girls in hijab walking to a nearby girls'
school that Jewish would-be terrorists have tried to blow
up with a bomb. The girls wear the hijab close to their
skulls in a way that pulls back the skin on their foreheads
and prevents stray hairs from escaping. They also wear blue
jeans under their skirts. Across the street is the Don
Derma family restaurant, which quaintly advertises
"cocktails" and serves ice cream and coffee in the
evenings.

I have different cars and drivers depending on what day it

is and where I want to go. When I want to go to Gaza, or to
the refugee camps, I travel in a white Land Rover with a
sticker from an international aid organization where three
of my friends have found work. Most of my official meetings
are arranged for me by two local translators, without whom
I am often as helpless as a child. The going rate for a
translator with decent contacts is $150 to $200 a day. N.,
a hard-core supporter of Fatah, speaks seven languages,
including German, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew. She was born
in Haifa and carries an Israeli passport. She was
recommended to me by a Palestinian functionary in Ramallah
who welcomed the opportunity to monitor my movements and
contacts. N.'s loyalty to Fatah means that she has
connections that more neutral translators lack; when she
hands off unmarked packages to men who dart out of
storefronts and alleyways near al-Manara Square, in
Ramallah, I decide that it is best to play dumb. Her
favorite game is to drive the wrong way through oncoming
traffic at checkpoints as the soldiers draw their guns and
order us to stop. "Sahafia—journalist!" she will shout,
leaving me to plead our case.

One evening I go to see one of Arafat's bodyguards, Abu

Helmi, at his well-secured apartment in Ramallah. To reach
the Qalandia checkpoint visitors must pass the ugly
concrete wall that divides the outer Arab villages from
East Jerusalem, and then an open field of rubble. To the
left of the rubble there is always a traffic jam at the
checkpoint. After four years of war, crossing from one side
to the other remains a haphazard affair. The road is cut by
a snarl of concrete blocks and barbed wire whose makeshift
appearance belies the fact that it is a permanent feature
of the landscape. Getting through the checkpoint from
Jerusalem to Ramallah takes about thirty to forty-five
minutes. The return trip to Jerusalem can take up to four
hours. After my days with N. are over, I sometimes go back
out with Q., a translator who is close to members of
Arafat's private guard. Q. grew up in Jerusalem and hates
Fatah, and is an excellent source of rumors and gossip. At
night the potholes are harder to spot, and the road stinks
of burning garbage.

On the night that Arafat was buried, Abu Helmi stayed up

with the rest of the Old Man's guards to see who would come
and pay their respects. He was amazed that so many of the
inner circle didn't come.

Abu Helmi is a simple man, of unbreakable tribal loyalties.

His eyes fill with tears at the mention of the Old Man as
he shows us photographs from the old days. Thirty pounds
heavier than in the earliest of the photos, but with the
same dark hair and bushy moustache, Abu Helmi bears a
marked physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein. It was Abu
Helmi's job to travel ahead and make the arrangements when
the Old Man visited foreign countries. When the Old Man's
plane went down in the Libyan desert, Abu Helmi suffered an
injury to his back. He walks stiffly over to a wide chest
of drawers, which contains several thousand photographs of
the Old Man taken on airstrips in Mali, Uganda, Comoros,
and other faraway places where the Palestine Liberation
Organization invested its money and the Old Man was
welcomed as a head of state. There are photos of the Old
Man with Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli, and in a pilgrim's
robes in Mecca.

"I don't want to speak about Abu Ammar as a president or a

revolutionary leader; I want to speak about Abu Ammar the
father," Abu Helmi begins, referring to the Palestinian
leader by another of his familiar nicknames. ("Abu Ammar,"
meaning "father of Ammar," is a fossilized cognomen for
"Yasir," which refers to a faithful companion of the
prophet Muhammad.) As he speaks, Abu Helmi stirs his coffee
with a sugar spoon that he squeezes gently between
forefinger and thumb.

"For many years, at nights, we would suddenly wake up, with

him coming over to see if we were covered, if we were
sleeping or resting," Abu Helmi says. "During the meals,
when there were no guests, we always ate together. He was
always insisting, giving us food, spreading, cutting,
saying 'Eat, eat.' If he was really happy with someone, he
would insist that he feed him from the food on his plate
into his mouth. He was always keeping us patient and
telling us, 'Patience is not measured by the hour.'

"Always he would notice very small details—even if someone

hadn't shaved for a day, he would always notice it and say,
'Why haven't you shaved?' He insisted that we wear ties and
that we look good and that we appear to the world as we
are, as civilized people."

"Did Abu Ammar enjoy that people around him had lavish
things although his own life was so modest?" I ask.

"He was very pleased," Abu Helmi answers. "He never minded.
He used to say, 'These people deserve to live—they should
enjoy their life.'"

"Would he remember a mistake long after it had happened?" I

ask.

"He doesn't forget. Not the right or the wrong. For us, he
never refused anything. Once my niece, the daughter of our
martyr, my brother, she was about to get married, and I
went in to ask permission to attend that marriage in
Jordan, and Abu Ammar immediately agreed, and he insisted
that I carry a present of gold. Whenever there was a
celebration or wedding, and we used to invite him by card,
he would send the congratulations."

Abu Helmi's youngest son, who speaks fluent English, and is

paralyzed from the neck down, is carried in through the
living room and laid on a hospital bed, where he can hear
the conversation. Abu Helmi's daughter brings more coffee
from the kitchen.

"Abu Ammar started his day at nine A.M. until one-thirty in

the afternoon," Abu Helmi says, wiping a bit of coffee from
his thick black moustache. "One-thirty was his nap time,
and lunch until four-thirty. Then it would stretch late
into the night. Whenever he woke up to pray the dawn
prayers, which was about three-thirty, he would always come
out to check on us and to see what was going on, 'Do I need
to make any phone calls?' He was always in constant
surveillance of his work. Any issue or request that reaches
the hands of Abu Ammar—it must be solved immediately."

After the Israelis attacked the Muqata in 2002, during

Operation Defensive Shield, the Old Man sandbagged the
windows for fear that he would be shot by Israeli snipers.
Proclaiming himself to be under siege, he refused to leave
the Muqata until his final illness, in October of 2004. On
sunny afternoons he positioned a chair in the breezeway
between the ruins of the compound's main building, a former
British prison, and the modern office building next door.
Here he talked on his cell phone and read telegrams from
foreign ministers of Europe, African heads of state, and
other notables expressing solidarity with the Palestinian
cause, the careful records of which were preserved on his
presidential Web site. "Nahnu la al-hunud al-humr [We are
not the red Indians]," he often proclaimed to the reporters
who came to see him. On slow afternoons he liked to sit
outside the Muqata with his guards.

"We would always be gathered around him," Abu Helmi

remembers. "Sometimes we would bring fruit and peel it for
him or make cookies here at home. He would ask, 'From where
did you bring this?' And we would say, 'We made it at home,
it's cheaper than buying it at the market.' He would say,
'Look at this guy, look how he's dressed.' He would always
say, if he saw a chocolate, 'This is too much calories,' or
'Too much fat.'"

"How did Abu Ammar feel about Yitzhak Rabin?"

"He loved him," Abu Helmi says, with all apparent

sincerity. "When I mention Rabin, I say, 'May God bless his
soul.' That means great respect and great affection."

"Do you remember what Abu Ammar felt about the Israeli
leaders who followed Rabin—about Peres and Netanyahu and
Barak?"

At this question Abu Helmi laughs, and makes a sharp

cutting motion with his hand.

TWO OLD FRIENDS WHO DIDN'T MAKE IT TO ARAFAT'S FUNERAL

Dennis Ross was the chief Middle East negotiator for the
United States from 1993 to 2000. I interviewed him in
Washington, and I see him again one evening at the American
Colony Hotel, in Jerusalem, beneath the starry ceiling of
the Pasha Room.

"I walked into this villa in Tunis," Ross tells me, "nice
but not extraordinary, and the first thing I noticed when I
walk in is it had the feel of a revolutionary hangout, but
not revolutionary in the sense of these guys who are out
there blowing up people. It reminded me of when I was a
student activist in Berkeley. You saw posters of Arafat as
a young man. You saw posters of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad, and
you had the feeling 'Geez, these were the founders of
Fatah,' and it was like a lair, a revolutionary lair, and
I'm struck by this feeling, like I'm back in a kind of
activist hangout where people are thinking, What can we do
today? And I have that feeling until I get through the
outer room, and then I see these guys through a mesh
curtain laughing at The Golden Girls. I hear Bea Arthur's
voice, and the incongruity of being in this revolutionary
lair and Bea Arthur's voice—you know, I started to laugh.
And I thought, What kind of revolutionary hangout is it
where the people watch The Golden Girls?

"The first time I went to complain to him about the

bombing—the first set of bombings were, I guess, in April
'94, in Hadera and Afula—and I'm with him, and he leans
over like this and he whispers, 'You know, it's Barak. He's
got this group, the OSS, in the Israeli military, and
they're doing this.' And I said to him, 'Don't be
ridiculous.' I said, 'You know the Israelis are not killing
themselves.' This was classic Arafat, never wanting to be
responsible."

Q: "So you don't think that he was actually a hysteric?"

A: "No, I think it was all an act."

Terje Roed-Larsen was the father of the Oslo Accords and is

the most visible representative of the United Nations in
the Middle East. A handsome man with a puckish sense of
humor, he is also a bit of a dandy. On the afternoon that I
meet him for a long conversation about Oslo, he is wearing
a white pocket square in the breast of his dove-gray suit,
which he has accented with a pair of silver cufflinks. He
met weekly and often every other day with Arafat for more
than a decade.
"Usually he would say, 'I agree in principle,'" Roed-Larsen
told me, "which means 'No.' Or 'Why not?'—which also means
'No.' Or 'I have to think about it.' Or 'It's not me, it's
Hamas.' Or 'I'm doing my best.'"

Q: "What was it like when he lied to you?"

A: "He lied all the time. And he knew it. I'd say, 'Abu
Ammar, cut the crap. Let's talk serious.' And then he could
either talk serious or not talk serious. He'd say
nonsense."

Q: "The nonsense would consist of what?"

A: "'It's not me—it's al-Qaeda.' 'It's the Iranians.' 'It

was a Lebanese ship.' 'It's the Syrians.' All that kind of
stuff. Of course everybody around him knew he was behind
it. He didn't tell any of his closest companions. Because
he always operated with layers and layers and layers and
layers. He was extremely compartmentalized. His dirty-
tricks domain—he didn't inform any of his ministers. They
didn't have a clue about it. He had a financial cupboard.
He had a dirty-tricks cupboard. He had a white-business
cupboard. He had a black-business cupboard. Everything was
compartmentalized. He was a master manipulator, and in a
way he was a master politician who made catastrophic
mistakes in both moral and political terms. He thought he
was immortal; he trusted that he had God's hand protecting
him for everything. And he goes away in the middle of the
biggest defeat of his life. That was one of the reasons he
was so miserable before he died."

Q: "Do you remember the last time you talked to him?"

A: "I was at home in Herzlyia on a Sunday. I remember it

vividly. I hadn't spoken to him in eighteen months. My cell
phone rings."

Roed-Larsen's voice suddenly gets higher, and then he

starts screeching like someone's crazy old aunt.

"'Terje! Terje! It is Abu Ammar! How are you? How are you?
How was the holiday?' And then he says, 'Ah-dah-dah, always
remember, Terje, eh, your wife is my sister! my sister! my
sister! And I am the uncle of your children. Your children,
the uncle!' And then he said, 'And you are always welcome
to see me when you wish.' That was it. He got sick the week
after, and then he died."

"WE ANNOUNCE TOURISM!"

The drive from Jerusalem to Nablus, the West Bank city that
is known in the Hebrew Bible as Shchem, home to Jacob and
his children, takes about two hours. Or it might take three
hours. Or it could take five. My friend Nadir is driving me
there to visit Munib al-Masri, one of Yasir Arafat's oldest
friends and now the richest man in Palestine.

The line of vehicles at the Nablus checkpoint this

afternoon is short. Cabdrivers wait on the other side of
the barrier to take passengers to their destinations inside
the city. In the separate lane for settlers three religious
Jewish children, two boys and a young girl, try to hitch a
ride back to their fortresslike dwellings on the rocky
hillside.

Nablus is a city built between two biblical mountains, Har

Grizim and Har Ebal. In the Bible, Har Grizim was blessed
with a bountiful spring, and Har Ebal was cursed. Al-
Masri's gorgeous neo-Palladian house sits on top of Har
Grizim, overlooking the refugee camps and the old casbah of
Nablus. Visitors are greeted by a statue of Hercules in the
center of the hall. Sunlight shining in from a dome above
traces the hour on the polished marble floor. Other rooms,
which I wander through with the gentle encouragement of my
host, contain such varied treasures as the floor of a
2,000-year-old Roman villa, a Rafaelo tapestry,
seventeenth-century French dining-room furniture, and what
al-Masri proclaims to be the oldest mirror in the world,
which originally came from Venice, and which broke on its
way here from Ramallah. One of al-Masri's sons designed the
house. Five hundred men with donkeys carried out his plans
at the height of the intifada, carting the stones and the
precious antiques up the side of the mountain.

A hawkishly handsome man of seventy-one, al-Masri was born

in Nablus and graduated from the University of Texas. He is
the rare example of a wealthy Palestinian who made his
money elsewhere and came back to Palestine out of
nationalist motives.

"Yes, the Palestinians missed a lot of opportunities, but

don't blame us," he tells me. "We were a million people in
this land, and the Israelis were less than a hundred
thousand people. But they came here very determined, and
they worked very hard. Then they committed a few massacres
that made people afraid, and then our stupid leaders told
the people to leave. We always tend to say it's a Zionist
plot with the British. What we call a plot, they call a
plan."

As one of the leading financiers of the Palestinian

national movement, al-Masri was close to Arafat for almost
half a century. His first acquaintance with the movement
came when he was the head of Phillips Petroleum operations
in Algeria, where he met Khalil al-Wazir, otherwise known
as Abu Jihad, the organizational genius of the Fatah
movement, who was assassinated in Tunis in 1988. Al-Wazir
had been sent to Algeria to open Fatah's first official
bureau at the invitation of the Algerian revolutionary Ben
Bella.

"One day I found somebody in front of me who said his name

was Khalil al-Wazir," al-Masri recalls. "He made a
favorable impression. I liked him. Maybe six months later
another guy came. It was Arafat. It was late '63, and he
starts coming back. I didn't like at the time the way Yasir
Arafat spoke, because he spoke in Egyptian dialect. Arafat
told me, 'What can I do? I went to school there. I did this
and I did that.' And we became very good friends. I felt a
great sympathy toward him, this little guy. He made believe
that he was born in Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem. He loved
Jerusalem a lot. Oh, in that early period he was very
dynamic. Piercing eyes, and always 'the cause.' Always a
pamphlet or something to show me."

Al-Masri made a fortune in the oil-services business, and

was invited to serve as a minister in the Jordanian cabinet
by his friend the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal.
By then Yasir Arafat was the head of the PLO and the hero
of the battle of Karamah, in March of 1968, when he led a
strong fight against an invading Israeli column and then
displayed captured Israeli vehicles in the streets of
Amman. The PLO forces in Jordan carried weapons in the
street and began to take over the country, setting up
roadblocks, collecting tribute, and meting out punishment.
As the Hashemite Kingdom tottered, al-Masri became an
important bridge between his friends Arafat and King
Hussein. He remembers visiting Arafat, where he was holed
up in a bunker on top of a mountain at the end of the
failed Palestinian revolt that became known as Black
September, surrounded by 6,000 or 7,000 Jordanian troops.

"It was a nice day, but he always wants to make it

dramatic, Arafat," al-Masri says, with a forgiving wave of
his hand. "He wants to take us down to the bunker. It
stinks, it's smelly, dark. I said, 'Come on'—he made his
point. He took us down anyway. He made us cry about how bad
it was for the Palestinians. He said the Jordanian army
went to Palestinian houses and they were killing the men
and doing things to the women. Of course, when we went down
the mountain, the first Jordanian soldier we saw said you
did this and that to us, and now you Palestinians will have
the gun."

Arafat refused al-Masri's invitation to meet with the king

at Amman. Instead he went to Lebanon. Wasfi al-Tal was
assassinated shortly after by members of Black September,
the Fatah terrorist group that was created to avenge the
Palestinian defeat in Jordan. His assassins shot him in a
hotel lobby in Cairo; one of them got down on his hands and
knees and lapped at Tal's blood.

"No doubt Arafat was a great man," al-Masri says. "No doubt
he had vision. Most of the people that you see now being
very important, I see them wanting the grace of Yasir
Arafat. They want to be in his grace. Ah, he thought money
was power," al-Masri adds, with a wistful glance around his
study. The money he spent to buy the loyalty of his court,
al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a
functioning Palestinian state instead.

"With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could

have built Palestine in ten years. Waste, waste, waste. I
flew over the West Bank in a helicopter with Arafat at the
beginning of Oslo, and I told him how easy we could make
five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of
people here; and have the right of return for the refugees.
If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a
solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and
water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of
land."

Al-Masri's eyes mist over. "Abu Ammar, yes. He's a simple

man. He slept on a simple bed. He doesn't want any houses.
He doesn't want anything. I remember one day I wanted to
bring him some free suits, tailor-made suits, you know, and
he said no, no, no. I can't. But he gave me a suit. He told
me, 'This is my suit. You make it longer, you wear it and
have it.' Be very interesting for you to see."

"Let's go eat," he says, beckoning me to join him. We eat

at the table in his kitchen, which is adjacent to his grand
house.

Halfway through lunch an aide brings down the suit, one of

the famous military tunics that Arafat's guards bought at
surplus stores. The brass buttons are decorated with the
Fatah eagle. I check the inside of the jacket for a
tailor's label, and find there is none. "Who would dare?"
al-Masri explains.

"Put it on," he urges me. I put on the jacket, and find

that Arafat was approximately my size, with slightly
narrower shoulders. One of the inner pockets closes with a
zipper.

"He kept money inside," al-Masri says. I suggest that it is

strange to think that Arafat managed the affairs of his
people from the inside pocket of this coat.

Al-Masri remembers sitting with Arafat one night in 1988 as

the Palestinian leader negotiated a formula that would
allow the United States to recognize the PLO. "They gave
him the formula, and he said it in a speech in Geneva, but
he put in extra words, so no one could figure out what he
was saying," al-Masri remembers. "The Americans said, 'No
way.' So I stayed up all night with him and Dick Murphy,
the assistant secretary of state, to work out what he must
say. The formula was 'We totally and absolutely renounce
all forms of terrorism.' So they called a press conference,
and he said everything right, except instead of 'terrorism'
he said, 'We announce tourism! We announce all forms of
tourism!'"

Talk of Arafat's last illness makes al-Masri sad again.

"Every morning I used to go see him and give him the
medicine because he would not take it from anybody else,"
he remembers, looking moodily out over his lawn. "Yeah, and
I never thought he would die."

"How long did you know that he was sick?" I ask.

"For the last year. Last year in September he told me he
doesn't feel well. So, and he felt that something was not
right, and it looks like he had the same symptoms again,
but the last time he had enough immunity. Yeah, he knew."

I am struck by al-Masri's use of the word "immunity," which

is a word characteristically associated with AIDS. Rumors
that Arafat died of "a shameful illness" spread quickly
through the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat, who married his
wife, Suha, in 1990, was often surrounded by children and
was openly affectionate with some of his bodyguards. The
Palestinian leadership denounced reports that Arafat was a
homosexual as lies spread by Mossad, the Israeli foreign-
intelligence agency. Accounts also circulated that a secret
agreement had been reached between the Israelis and
Arafat's heirs, stipulating that the truth about Arafat's
fatal illness would not be released, the Palestinian leader
would be buried in Ramallah and not in Jerusalem, and the
wanted men who had accompanied him in his captivity would
not be pursued by Israeli forces.

"He knew that it was the same disease that he had a year
ago?" I ask. Al-Masri nods his head.

"Same symptoms," he answers. "But look how strong he was. I

mean, when Abu Mazen came," he says, referring to Arafat's
longtime deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, "we brought him from one
bed in his small room to a bigger room where we could sit.
I sat on the bed. Abu Mazen sat in front of him and Abu
Alaa sat in front of him. He said, 'Ah, Mazen.' His face
was very red, and you know that he was very sick, but he
wants to show that he was still in control of the details
with Mazen, you know? He said, 'I have this flu, ah, ah. I
have this flu. Came and went to my stomach.'"

THE OLD MAN'S POCKETS

Along the outer walls of the Muqata guards lounge beneath

tattered posters of the white-bearded lunatic figure that
Abu Ammar became in the last years of his life. His people
accepted his foibles because he was their father. He named
them. He paid for their weddings and their funerals. It was
part of his paternal pose that no Palestinian who asked him
for money went away empty-handed. When he visited cities,
he was followed by an aide with a Samsonite briefcase
stuffed with bundles of cash, which he distributed to the
people who lined up to beg for money. Ordinary Palestinians
placed classified advertisements in the newspaper asking
Arafat for money. Others wrote him letters. "I sent him a
letter on the occasion of the wedding of my second
daughter," a qahwehgee, or "coffee guy," who works outside
the Muqata tells me one afternoon, as he fills a small cup
with hot black coffee from a large brass boiler. He
indicates with a nod that the Old Man was generous.

Such generosity was a common feature of Arafat's rule.

Documents taken by the Israeli army from the Muqata paint
an astonishing portrait of the range of requests to which
Arafat routinely responded with cash. The captured
documents record requests for school fees for poor children
in Gaza (Arafat gave them $250 each) and $34,000 in tuition
and expenses for the daughters of a PLO official to study
in Britain ("$10,000 is to be paid"). Though Arafat
routinely cut his bequests to ordinary Palestinians to half
or a third of what was asked, no such economies were
inflicted on the petitions of his top officials. When one
member of Arafat's circle requested money for the purchase
of paintings of Mecca and Medina intended as gifts for a
lady friend, Arafat was glad to oblige ("The two pictures
should be paid—66 thousand dollars").

Members of the presidential guard got more money than they

asked for. When Lieutenant Mahfoudh Aissa asked for plane
tickets for his wife and four children to visit his sick
mother-in-law in Tunis, Arafat approved the request,
adding, "The tickets are to be paid for and an additional
$1,000 for expenses." He then forwarded it as usual to the
Ministry of Finance, which served through most of his reign
as the Palestinian leader's personal cashbox.

For those at the top of the heap the rewards were much
larger and more systematic. The amounts of money stolen
from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people
through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are
so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the
total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the
Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat
himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively
estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900
million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that
did not include the money that he and his family siphoned
off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts,
kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an
official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's
cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43
percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that
another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to
the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's
personal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget
went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of
$73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on
the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The
financial resources of the PLO, which may have amounted to
somewhere between one and two billion dollars, were never
included in the PA budget. Arafat hid his personal stash,
estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200
separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of
which have been uncovered since his death.

Contrary to the comic-book habits of some Third World

leaders, such as President Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and
Saddam Hussein, Arafat eschewed lurid displays of wealth.
His corruption was of a more sober-minded type. He was a
connoisseur of power, who used the money that he stole to
buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay
gunmen, and to collect hangers-on the way other men collect
stamps or butterflies. Arafat had several advisers who
oversaw the system of patronage and theft, which was
convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles
by Ronen Bergman that appeared during the late 1990s in the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The PLO treasurer, Nizar Abu
Ghazaleh, ran the company al-Bahr ("the Sea") for a small
number of wealthy shareholders, including Arafat's wife,
Suha. Al-Bahr set the price of a ton of cement in Gaza at
$74, of which $17 went into Arafat's private bank account.
One of Arafat's favorite bagmen, Harbi Sarsour, ran the
General Petroleum Company, which established a monopoly
over all the gasoline and fuel-oil products sold in the
West Bank and Gaza. A company called al-Sakhra ("the
Rock"), run by Fuad Shubaki on behalf of Fatah, profited
hugely from an exclusive contract to provide all uniforms
and other supplies to the Palestinian security forces.
Official monopolies on basic goods and services had
exclusive suppliers on the Israeli side. These profitable
contracts were made available by Arafat to companies
associated with former high-ranking members of the Israeli
civil administration and the security services in the West
Bank and Gaza.

The genius behind this system was Muhammad Rachid, who

became Arafat's closest economic adviser. A onetime protégé
of Abu Jihad, Rachid was a former magazine editor who
became involved in the diamond business. He came to
Arafat's attention because of his keen talent as a
businessman, and because he was an ethnic Kurd—which meant
that he was safely removed from the family- and clan-based
politics that always threatened to disrupt the division of
the spoils.

In their cities and villages Palestinians were subject to

the extortion and violence of Arafat's overlapping security
services, which competed among themselves for payoffs,
arbitrarily arrested people and seized their land, and
forced citizens to pay double or triple the price for
everything from flour and gasoline to cigarettes, razor
blades, and sheep feed. The fact that nearly everyone in
Palestinian political life had taken something directly
from Arafat's hand made it hard to criticize him; it was
easier to go along. In 1991, at the low point of Fatah's
finances, Ali Shahin, one of Arafat's earliest allies,
wrote a secret report lambasting Fatah's "inconceivable
moral degradation," for which he blamed the excesses of a
leader whose true interests were "the red carpet, the
private plane of the President, free rein to spend money."
Shahin became the minister of supplies in Arafat's
government and was notorious for selling spoiled flour and
making truckloads of chocolates sit at the Erez checkpoint
in the heat in order to help out a friend who owned the
only candy factory in Gaza. The economy of the Palestinian
territories, which had enjoyed startlingly high growth
rates after 1967, when it passed from Jordanian and
Egyptian control into the hands of the Israelis, stagnated
and then went backward. In less than a decade Yasir Arafat
and his clique managed to squander not only the economic
well-being but also the considerable moral capital amassed
by the Palestinian people during two and a half decades of
Israeli military rule.

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICES

As the Oslo peace process collapsed into violence, an

Israeli investment adviser named Ozrad Lev had a falling-
out with his business partner, Yossi Ginossar. The two men
had formed a company together and worked closely with
Muhammad Rachid. Angry at both men, Lev came forward and
spoke to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv about his own role
in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by
Yasir Arafat from the Palestinian people with the
connivance of the Israeli government and international
authorities. The story he told placed an exclamation point
at the end of a decade of official lies and flagrant
corruption which were justified in the name of peace. A
former Israeli military-intelligence officer, Lev had left
the army in 1987 and gotten a business degree from
Pepperdine University, in California. In 1997 he was
approached by Ginossar, a former deputy director of Shin
Bet, Israel's feared domestic-security service, who had
retired in disgrace after participating in a cover-up of
the murder of two Palestinian teenagers who hijacked a bus
with plastic guns. A charismatic figure who spoke fluent,
idiomatic Arabic, Ginossar was famous for his brutal manner
toward people who displeased him. He met Arafat in the
early 1990s and later helped an Israeli company called Dor
win an exclusive contract to supply gasoline to the
Palestinian Authority. Ginossar set up a meeting between
Lev and Rachid, who was looking to find a safe home in
Switzerland for hundreds of millions of dollars that he had
extracted from the Palestinian economy.

Licensed by a codicil to the Oslo Accords known as the

Paris protocol—the agreement that established tax, customs,
and other formal economic arrangements between the
Palestinian Authority and the State of Israel—such
corruption was held by all but the most far-out critics of
Arafat's rule to be essential to the Oslo process. Every
month the Israeli government was obliged to forward the VAT
and other tax revenues collected on goods and services in
the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.
According to a side agreement reached between the Israeli
government and Arafat, who was represented by Rachid, fuel-
tax revenues were deposited in Arafat's private account
#80-219000 at the Hashmonaim Street branch of Bank Leumi,
in Tel Aviv. Arafat and Rachid also diverted funds to a
special account at the Arab Bank in Ramallah. Every month
up through the beginning of the intifada the Israeli
government transferred millions of dollars to the man whom
it had denounced for four decades as the world's most
dangerous terrorist.

Ben Caspit broke the story that became known in Israel as

"the Ginossar Affair" in December of 2002. The reporter was
a friend of Lev's from childhood and had known Ginossar for
years. "He was a very interesting guy, very tough, very bad
manners," Caspit remembers, when I meet with him one
morning in Tel Aviv. "You could sit with Yossi in the
fanciest restaurant and he would start yelling at the
waitress like she just killed her youngest son," Caspit
recalls. "But he knew how to make himself contacts."

As I sit with Caspit on the wooden boardwalk outside Yama,

a bohemian hangout in the port section of the city, the
claustrophobia of the West Bank feels very far away. Here
you can listen to Hebrew reggae and smell the salty sea
air. A rusted steel cargo crane broods over the man-made
inlet, where an old motorboat has been pulled up onto the
shore. The wild party scene in the warehouses on the
weekends rivals that of Reykjavik in the winter, Caspit
insists. If this is not exactly the Zionist dream of
Israel's ascetic socialist founders, it speaks to the
escapist desires of a secular Israeli society that has seen
its dream of peace with the Arabs wither on the vine, and
has become inured to flagrant official corruption.

The man that Arafat called "Joe" was the Palestinian

leader's all-purpose back channel to the Israeli political
leadership. He was also a lover of the good life, who
smoked Cuban cigars and drove showy, expensive cars, and
whose enthusiastic eating habits helped to finance Tel
Aviv's proliferation of fancy restaurants. It made sense
that the Palestinian leader would seek out someone like
Ginossar. "Israel is a crazy place—one day you have one
government, the next another," Caspit explains. "Ginossar
is there all the time, and he has the ability to be close
with Rabin, Peres, Barak, Sharon, with everyone."

There were those who saw Ginossar's proximity to Arafat and

Rachid in a more troubling light. The former head of the
civil administration in Gaza, a brigadier general named
Yitzhak Segev, wrote to Barak in the fall of 1999 and
warned that Ginossar's business dealings with Rachid made
him a poor choice to represent Israel. But Ginossar was so
deeply enmeshed in the backroom diplomacy and business
deals at the center of the Middle East peace process that
it was impossible to get rid of him. His self-advertised
connections to high American officials such as Dennis Ross
and Ambassador Martin Indyk were augmented by his lucrative
business dealings with Stephen P. Cohen, a Harvard Ph.D.
and sometime university professor who jetted around the
Middle East in a private plane provided by the SlimFast
diet mogul Daniel Abraham. When Ginossar was excluded from
the Israeli delegation to the Camp David peace talks in
2000 as a security risk, he was quickly named a member of
the American delegation instead.

What Ozrad Lev had to offer Ginossar and Rachid was a

connection to the world of high-toned Swiss banks, which
might have been leery of accepting deposits from a man once
numbered among the world's leading terrorists. An
investment account that belonged to the Palestinian
Authority and was managed by a former Israeli intelligence
officer presented fewer difficulties. Lev's first move was
to establish a financial-management company named Ledbury
and open an investment account at the Swiss bank Lombard
Odier, at 11 Rue de la Corraterie, in Geneva, through the
offices of a partner named Richard de Tscharner. On May 17,
1997, Rachid wrote a formal letter to de Tscharner
establishing the account, whose funds would be derived from
"Taxes and Customs revenues" and also from "Revenues
derived from various economic activity of the Palestinian
Authority, through its state-owned companies." Rachid also
promised that the PA would not use Ledbury funds "for any
war or aggression oriented activities," a commitment that
might have given a more-cautious banker pause. De Tscharner
agreed to set up the account on the spot.

From 1997 to 2000 the sum in the Ledbury portfolio grew to

more than $300 million. Lev also agreed to create an
investment fund for leading members of the Palestinian
security apparatus, which was registered on the Isle of Man
under the name Supr a-din—a pun on "Saladin." Management
commissions for the fund were paid to Rachid's deputy,
Walid Najab, through a company called MCS, which forwarded
a commission to Ginossar and Lev through a company that the
two men had set up in Tel Aviv under the name ARK, a Hebrew
acronym for "Anachnu Rotzim Kesef"—"We Want Money."

These days Ozrad Lev spends lots of time in a restaurant in

Ramat Hasharon called Reviva and Celia, which might pass
for a cool screenwriters' hangout in Santa Monica. Lev
himself is very Californian, in a green polo shirt and
close-cut hair. He got to know Ginossar in the early 1980s,
while serving in Israel's military intelligence, Aman. He
remembers Ginossar as a brilliant but forbidding figure.
Later, while serving as aide-de-camp to General Ehud Barak,
then the head of Aman, Lev was at the scene of the Bus 300
hijacking, which destroyed Ginossar's career in Shin Bet.
Ginossar's life after that was a long series of failures
until he met Muhammad Rachid.
"Every place he went, he failed," Lev remembers. "One day
in 1996 he told me, 'Ozrad, I've been waiting for this a
long time. You have to meet Muhammad Rachid.' I said,
'Okay, who is Muhammad Rachid?' He said, 'Look, Muhammad
Rachid is someone who I know will like you very much and
you will like him.'" Rachid made a strong impression on the
former Israeli officer.

"He understood the Israeli mentality head and shoulders

above any of the Palestinians I've ever met," Lev
remembers. "He was very calm, not arrogant, calculating
every word that came out of his mouth, and he had an
excellent sense of humor. Physically he was very Israeli. I
looked at him and I felt as if I had seen this guy dozens
of times on the street in Tel Aviv."

Anxious to cover himself in the event that the peace

process collapsed, Lev insisted that the money in the Swiss
account stay put for five years, and that withdrawals be
made only to a heavily monitored Palestinian Authority
account at the Arab Bank branch in Ramallah. Starting with
$16 million, Rachid funneled tens of millions of dollars to
Lev, who took the deposits to Switzerland. Returns were
excellent. Arafat was grateful. In July of 1997 Lev was
invited to meet Arafat, who presented him with a model of
the al-Aqsa mosque made of seashells from Gaza. He found
the Palestinian leader to be humble and charming, and well
informed about the Swiss accounts.

"He knew about all the details," Lev remembers. "When he

talks to you, the sentences are so simple, so clear, which
means that he is very smart. He knew that there were
several accounts; he talked to me about the other names—
Soditic and Atlas. He told me that he appreciates very much
what I'm doing for the Palestinian people, and that he
hoped many Israelis would go my way." The only thing that
disconcerted him about the meeting, Lev says, was how ugly
Arafat was. Arafat's hands, he noticed, were as pale as the
hands of a corpse.

"Arafat, when you met him, he was not a corrupt person,"

Lev says. "He lived on five shekels a day. He had a plan.
Oslo was not his plan. The whole thing about the secret
accounts is to keep the financial flexibility to move money
to the second stage. He thought that demographically
they're going to win the war, and in order to do that, you
have to be patient and let the Israelis bleed."
"He succeeded in everything," Lev concludes. "Our life
philosophy here is impatience—because of the Holocaust,
because of the military threats. In Israel we say that when
we have sex we do it with sneakers on, so that we can run
to our friends and tell them how it was. The Arabs have a
word, tsumut—which means holding to the ground where your
ancestors lived. My ancestors are from Germany," he adds.
"I don't understand the meaning of tsumut. You know, Rachid
and I went to the promenade once in Tel Aviv, and he said,
'I told Arafat many times, the Israelis are their own worst
enemies. We don't have to shoot one bullet—just be patient,
don't have any agreement with them, and all of what you see
here will be ours.'"

On June 19, 2000, after a dispute about the division of the

spoils, Rachid terminated Lev's authority over the account
and removed the financial controls that Lev had insisted
on. Three months later the second intifada began. In August
of 2001 tens of millions began flowing out of the Lombard
Odier accounts. By December of 2001 a decision was reached
to close the accounts. The money made its way to banks
around the world, including accounts controlled by Rachid
in London and Cairo.

THE INNER CIRCLE

The Oslo Accords created something called the Palestinian

Authority, but to this day there really is no such thing.
The assertion that the Palestinian Authority does not exist
may seem strange to Western ears, because honorifics such
as "President Yasir Arafat" and "Foreign Minister Nabil
Shaath" have been employed so often over the past ten years
that it is hard for all but the most devilish skeptics not
to assume the existence of a state apparatus roughly
equivalent to that which operates in the United States or
in Western Europe. Instead what exists on the ground is a
vast and scattered archipelago of randomly located
government ministries, competing security-services
headquarters, and prisons that operate according to no
coordinated plan. In the slow-moving offices of the major
ministries, located in the al-Tiri district of Ramallah,
you can find the murafiqoon of the dead leader—his
companions of the last four decades, the veterans of the
legendary victories and defeats and thousands of late-night
meetings and press conferences. The one constant among the
crystal eagles, EU paperweights, inlaid mother-of-pearl
clocks from Syria, and other mementoes of their travels is
the standard-issue high-definition photograph of the
golden-domed Mosque of Omar, in Jerusalem, set against a
cloudless blue sky.

Having known and trusted him for so long, Arafat's

companions found it impossible not to believe that with one
roll of the dice, the Old Man would reverse his fortunes
and escape from the morass of petty administrative details
and large-scale corruption that had come to characterize
his rule. The Fatah men who had been his equals and trusted
advisers over the years, and had the revolutionary
credentials to stand up to him, like Abu Jihad, engineer of
the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the late
1980s, which became known as the "intifada," and Abu Iyad,
the organizational boss of the Black September terrorist
group, were assassinated before the Oslo process began.
Having buried his peers and survived repeated assassination
attempts himself, Arafat was no longer first among equals.
His was the only opinion that mattered in Palestine.
Arafat's fantasy life and his money gripped the vital
organs of the Palestinian national movement for so long
that practical political thinking became impossible.

As the identification of Yasir Arafat with the Palestinian

national movement became fixed in stone with the signing of
the Oslo Accords, those members of the international
diplomatic community who saw Oslo as a great moral and
political achievement felt themselves to be correspondingly
obliged to excuse the Palestinian leader's most outrageous
statements and actions as the quirks of a man who had
dedicated himself to peace.

Not everyone was convinced by the hopeful fiction that

Arafat was the Middle East's answer to Nelson Mandela.
Young Palestinian revolutionaries soon had a closer look at
the leader they had helped to bring back from exile. The
Arafat they had worshipped from afar during the seventies
and eighties was a visionary ascetic—the imaginative
projection of brave and frightened Palestinians, most of
whom were barely out of their teens, who conjured up the
heroic leader they needed from radio broadcasts and
clandestine texts that were passed from hand to hand and
studied like pages of the Koran. The sight of the high-
handed autocrat and his potbellied retinue in the flesh
came as a shock to many young Palestinians, few of whom had
ever ventured outside the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.
Young Fatah cadres in the West Bank and Gaza soon found
that the corruption of their elders was matched by a
complete lack of positive ideas—however farfetched or
loony—about the form that a future Palestinian polity might
take. There would be no Year Zero of the Palestinian
revolution. Western-style parliamentary institutions did
exist but had little power. What followed Arafat's return
to Palestine was a decade-long thieves' banquet at which
Fatah's old guard divided up the spoils of Oslo and treated
ordinary Palestinians as conquered subjects. When the
second intifada, popularly known as the al-Aqsa intifada,
started, the members of the young guard, most of whom were
now firmly anchored in middle age, rallied around the Fatah
leader Marwan Barghouti—whose fiery denunciations of
official corruption had led to frequent clashes with
Arafat—in the hope that violence would serve as a catalyst
for change. Here again, the young guard of Fatah would
become little more than cannon fodder for their elders;
Barghouti was arrested by the Israelis in 2002, during
Operation Defensive Shield, for masterminding terror
attacks, and was sentenced to five consecutive life terms
in prison.

In the cafés and apartments in Ramallah where we met, some

of the leading members of Fatah's young guard spoke openly
of their anger and disappointment at what had happened in
Palestine since Oslo. They reserved their bitterest
denunciations not for the Israelis but for Arafat's
cronies, who had used state jobs to get rich, and showed
little interest in their revolutionary progeny. "We
remember their songs, their poems, their speeches, their
beliefs, their thoughts, the names of their kids, even the
number of their shoes," Ziad Abu Ain, one of Barghouti's
closest friends, told me one afternoon, as we sat and
talked in his apartment in Ramallah. "They don't even
remember our names."

For the members of the old guard questions about how a few
million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were
to be governed were not of any particular interest. The
Palestinian question was part of the larger pan-Arab
discourse that had occupied the Nasserite and anti-
colonialist study groups of their student days in Cairo,
Damascus, and Beirut. As the symbolic leader of the
Palestinian people, Yasir Arafat was the incarnation of a
revolution that presented itself as a model for the rest of
the Arab world—a symbol of secular revolutionary purity and
anti-colonial zeal that had been supplanted in the eighties
by the success of the Iranian revolution, the Sunni
fundamentalist jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan,
and Hizbollah's war against the Israelis in Lebanon.

The predominant note in the old guard's reminiscences of

their leader is nostalgia for the sense of the historical
centrality of the Palestinian national struggle that Arafat
provided, which was as addictive to his followers as any
drug. Arafat's longtime foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, was
thirteen years old when he first heard the young Arafat
asking his father for donations to help Palestinian
refugees in Cairo and Alexandria. Even then, he says, he
recognized the future president of Palestine. As a
guerrilla leader in the sixties and seventies, Arafat led
his fighters in battle; he gave them the noms de guerre
that they would carry with them for the rest of their
lives.

Bereft of the man that many of them regarded as their

father, Arafat's companions still live by their dead
leader's schedule, staying up late at night like aging
bohemians. At Fatah headquarters in Ramallah, which I visit
several nights a week with N., it is easy to find the
ancient champions of the revolution chain-smoking
cigarettes and drinking endless little cups of black
coffee. The building looks like a plush union hall in New
Jersey, with green-marble floors and bluish clouds of smoke
that asphyxiate the potted plants. Men in black-leather
coats and heavy sweaters lounge away their evenings on
padded leather couches.

The new leader, Mahmoud Abbas, lacks the Old Man's personal
touch, they complain. He doesn't remember birthdays and
weddings, and no one comes to him to resolve personal
disputes. Some of the Old Man's inner circle have already
sent their families to Amman or Tunis and their money to
London or Cairo.

Upstairs I meet Ahmad Abdul Rahman, the former head of

Arafat's propaganda operations, who sits in his navy pea
coat smoking Dunhills with their gold band, a
revolutionary's privilege. His glossy jet-black hair and
dark eyebrows contrast sharply with his deeply lined
smoker's face. Abdul Rahman was close to Arafat for almost
forty years, and frequently issued statements in the Old
Man's name.
"It is because of Arafat that we stayed together for this
long, long time," he explains. "He invents events if there
are no events. He invents activities if there are no
activities."

"Did his style of working change from Beirut to Tunis to

Ramallah?" I ask.

"He faced new problems here," Abdul Rahman concedes. "If he

was told 'This ministry does not need people, it is
filled,' he'd say, 'Okay' and then create another ministry.
In this way he built the main basis for the state."

The marble-floored Palestine Media Center is by far the

snazziest government ministry in Ramallah. It is run by the
veteran propagandist Yasir Abd Rabbo, who looks like a
ladies' man at a red-brick college in Manchester or Leeds
and walks with a limp that he claims is the result of an
old war wound. An inveterate "splittist," who joined and
left a long list of secular leftist Palestinian parties, he
is a charter member of the Arafatist bloc. He is also a
habitual gossip. He knows N. well, and is happy to grant us
an interview. Like many of the men I talk to, he speaks of
the late Palestinian leader in the present tense.

"Arafat's great secret is patience," Abd Rabbo explains, of

the man he served for more than three decades. "He does not
cut even a thread to a fly. He keeps lines open with
everybody. He is Arafat the progressive, Arafat the
Islamist, Arafat the conservative, and Arafat the
enlightened. So he was with the Saudi kings and with the
kings of the Kremlin at the same time, with Fidel Castro
and all kinds of imams and the pope. The one main issue he
did not compromise in his life was the independence of the
Palestinian movement. He believed since the beginning that
if he did not preserve the independence of the Palestinian
movement from the other Arab regimes, he will be doomed."

Abd Rabbo's area of particular expertise in the 1970s was

the politics of the European left and the Soviet bloc. A
table near his desk shows off a laughing Buddha, a crystal
eagle, and a photo book titled Russia: The Country of Vast
Expanses. He explains to me how Arafat patiently led the
Palestinian national movement up the ladder to the inner
halls of the Kremlin. His goal was the near-hallucinatory
possibility of state sponsorship by one of the two reigning
Cold War superpowers. After the October War of 1973, which
began Egypt's migration into the American camp, Arafat's
dream of Soviet sponsorship became a reality.

"We started to meet Brezhnev, we started to meet Andropov,

Chernenko, and the others. Of course, Arafat is always
trying to give the impression that he is—"

"A Marxist?" I wonder out loud.

"No, never, never, never," Abd Rabbo answers, appalled.

"That he is so independent, that he is Arafat the
Palestinian, the nationalist, the Muslim who is building
relations with Moscow. I remember in one of the first
visits, suddenly, I don't know why—but I understand why—he
wanted to pray the noon prayers inside the Kremlin. We were
begging him, 'Don't do that, postpone it, God will permit
you. There is no access to God here.' He got down on his
knees in the middle of the room, on the carpet, and he
bowed down to Mecca and he said his prayers. This was also
a message to the Saudis, you see—'I am Arafat, the Muslim,
and I built these relations with the Soviet Union.'"

Arafat's defiant behavior toward the Soviets in the

seventies and eighties mirrored exactly the tantrums that
would puzzle and intimidate Western diplomats in the
nineties. When I ask Abd Rabbo if any of the Soviet leaders
had Arafat's number, he nods.

"Andropov," he answers, smiling ever so slightly at the

memory of the legendary KGB spymaster who became premier of
the Soviet Union for a short time in the early 1980s. When
the Palestinians met with Andropov, in 1982, he seemed old
and frail and appeared to doze off. "And Arafat took his
time explaining everything, going from one continent to
another, to the seventh sky and down, talking about
everything that he had in his mind. He talked about how he
had defeated the Israeli army, and how he had developed his
own weapons factories, and how he made anti-tank missiles
from his own secret designs. And in the middle of his—let's
call them flights of fancy—Andropov raised his head up and
told him, 'Chairman Arafat, let's stop it now.' So Arafat
stopped talking nonsense and started talking politics."

Mamduh Nofal is the former military commander of the

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the
commander of the Palestinian forces during the siege of
Beirut. A peculiarly Palestinian amalgam of poet, op-ed
writer, and guerrilla fighter, he is an imposing hulk of a
man, at once friendly and fierce, like a pirate in a
storybook. At the battle of Karamah, in Jordan, in 1968,
Nofal was a military leader for the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It was there that he began
his relationship with Arafat, he tells me when we meet in
his modern office in Ramallah. The sign outside his office
identifies him as a high-ranking official of Fatah.

"With the fighters, he lived with them as they lived. He

sat with them on the ground. He brought food for them and
fed them. This is not propaganda."

Nofal tells me that Arafat's strategic use of violence

after Oslo began with permitting Hamas and Islamic Jihad to
launch terror attacks. Arafat would then crack down on
those same organizations to show that he was in control.
Nofal first heard Arafat give orders that led directly to
violence, he says, before the riots that erupted over the
excavation of the Hasmonean tunnel, near the Haram al-
Sharif, in 1996. Nofal says that the impetus for the
violence was the statement by the newly elected Israeli
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he would not speak
to Arafat directly. Arafat was furious at the slight.

"I was with him in his office," Nofal recalls. "He got up
and walked around the desk. He was very, very angry.
Finally he calmed down a bit and he pointed to the phone on
his desk. He said, 'I will make Netanyahu call me on this
phone.'"

Arafat ordered demonstrators into the streets, and told

them to provoke the Israelis. When violence erupted, the
Israelis were blamed. "I was sitting with him again when
the phone on his desk rang, and he looked at me and said,
'It's Netanyahu.' And it was him."

The second intifada also began with the intention of

provoking the Israelis and subjecting them to diplomatic
pressure. Only this time Arafat went for broke. As a member
of the High Security Council of Fatah, the key decision-
making and organizational body that dealt with military
questions at the beginning of the intifada, Nofal has
firsthand knowledge of Arafat's intentions and decisions
during the months before and after Camp David. "He told us,
'Now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready,'"
Nofal remembers. Nofal says that when Barak did not prevent
Ariel Sharon from making his controversial visit to the
plaza in front of al-Aqsa, the mosque that was built on the
site of the ancient Jewish temples, Arafat said, "Okay,
it's time to work."

When it became clear that Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli

opposition leader, would win the Israeli elections in
February of 2001, Nofal went to Arafat and urged him to
call off the intifada. "There were a lot of people sitting
around, including Saeb Erekat and Yasir Abd Rabbo," Nofal
remembers.

"I told him, 'Abu Ammar, I need the security to speak

openly.' The Bedouin say, 'Give me the security to speak
freely.' He said to me, 'Speak.'

"I said to him, 'Abu Ammar, Barak will lose, Sharon is

coming, the military work is not our field. It is Sharon's
field. He needs it. So please, Abu Ammar, let us go out
from this field, and leave Sharon as the hayawan muftaris
[the flesh-eating animal] to play alone.'"

"Those who were sitting around Arafat, they said, 'Ah, you
are afraid of Sharon!'" Nofal recalls, shaking his head.
"'Sharon will not stay in power. Barak stayed eighteen
months. Sharon will stay nine. And if we conquer him, this
is the last bullet in the Israeli gun!' They said, 'So,
khalas [enough already]—why are you afraid?' I said, 'I am
afraid that he will destroy us in these nine months, and I
doubt that he will fail.' At that time Arafat kept silent.
He was listening. But most of those around opposed what I
said."

"And I think Saudi Arabia also played a role in Arafat's

decision to keep the intifada going," Nofal says, agreeing
with a similar analysis presented to me by Abd Rabbo.
"Clinton put his initiative on the table on the eighteenth
of December, after three months of intifada. Arafat visited
Saudi Arabia. At that time the Saudi Arabian leadership
told him, 'Wait, don't give this card to Clinton. Clinton
is going, Bush is coming. Bush is the son of our friend. We
will get more for you from him.' Then we discovered that
Saudi Arabia couldn't do anything, that it is not a matter
of personal issues or friendship. And Sharon succeeded very
well, and put us in a corner."
Later that evening I meet Nasser al-Kidwa, Arafat's nephew
and the new Palestinian foreign minister, in the lobby of
the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah, a regular hangout for the
new Palestinian elite. Men sit on pastel-suede lounge
furniture and smoke cigarettes beneath a fresco of smirking
putti holding a swagged cloth. Al-Kidwa has little time for
frivolities. With his round face and small features, short
arms, and tiny fingers, there is something disconcertingly
fetal and half-formed about his physicality. Family was
never important to him or to his uncle, he tells me. All
that mattered was the success of the cause. He invites me
up to his bare hotel room, where he informs me about the
contents of his uncle's medical files.

"The funny thing is, I brought them to New York, and then
brought them back to Gaza, and then from Gaza to Ramallah,"
al-Kidwa remembers of the large binder—500-plus pages, with
tabs of several colors, containing x-rays and medical
charts—that he was given by the French authorities. "No one
believed they are in my damn suitcase, including the
Israelis. I just passed through the checkpoint without
telling anybody anything."

When I ask him whether he read the files, he shakes his

head. "I didn't look at them because I knew that we
wouldn't find a single word that was inconsistent with what
we were told," he says. "I personally think that it is
probably an unnatural cause."

"So the Israelis poisoned him?" I ask.

"I can't say that, because, again, this is too serious to

just be said like that," al-Kidwa answers.

He understood his uncle as a great actor who took pleasure

in his performances. "He succeeded in turning the cause of
the refugees into the cause of the century, while his enemy
is probably the strongest actor in the world, in modern
history if not beyond," al-Kidwa explains, his voice
falling almost to a whisper.

"That enemy being the United States?" I ask.

"No," he says. "Israel. And its supporters. The Jewish

community around the world."
Even here, in Ramallah, he is careful to whisper. When I
ask him to explain the achievements of his uncle's rule in
the context of the Palestinian national movement, his voice
returns to normal.

"He set some rules—noble, I think," al-Kidwa says. "For

instance, no one will be deprived of his salary, even
traitors. If you shoot at him, still your family will get
your salary, and your kids will still go to school."

ONE BIG PRISON

My trips to Gaza, a teeming seaside strip of land with a

distinctly Egyptian flavor, provide the most striking
evidence of the economic consequences of Arafat's misrule.
The Erez checkpoint, where I enter, is like a wound that
has been opened and reopened. Twenty-five-foot-high
sections of concrete barrier of the type that are being
used for the wall in Jerusalem stand next to a sandbagged
pillbox that has been reinforced with steel. A decade ago,
after the first intifada, the guard post here was a white-
painted wooden shack on the road. Now, past the elaborate
security barriers on the Israeli side, a long, dank, tin-
roofed corridor stretches toward Gaza like a passageway for
cattle. At the end of the corridor is a ramshackle guard
post. The Palestinian soldier at the post wears green army
fatigues and a knit wool hat embroidered with the words
"Top Gun." Aided by the light of a single bulb, he
laboriously inscribes the passport numbers of entering
visitors with a worn pencil in a spiral-bound notebook. On
the wall behind him is a framed photograph of the Old Man.

To the right of the checkpoint is the Erez industrial area.

One of the few tangible results of hundreds of meetings to
figure out a way to help Israeli and foreign manufacturers
tap the Palestinian labor market, the industrial area is
nearly abandoned after a series of suicide bombings. A wet,
acrid haze from untreated sewage and burning plastic hangs
over Gaza during the daylight hours, and gets worse at
night. The sewage-treatment plant in Beit Lahia is working
at three times its normal capacity.

It takes me only two hours to travel the entire length of

Gaza. My destination is the city of Rafah, which lies half
on the Israeli side and half on the Egyptian side of the
border. Rafah is a tropical place with famous hothouses
that grow flowers for export and excellent vegetables.
Egyptian flags fly above the high wall that marks the
border, which is a magnet for smugglers. Israeli raids to
stop the contraband have turned the neighborhoods of Rafah
nearest the border into a moonscape of shattered concrete.
It is easy to see why Rafah has become a byword for the
misery of the Palestinian people since the beginning of the
intifada.

Said Zourub, the mayor of Rafah, is a middle-aged man with

a handsome black moustache, who is wearing a black
turtleneck in the 90Ëš heat. Riding in his Ford Explorer,
we stop frequently as groups of men warn of an incursion by
an Israeli armored unit. Rounding the corner, we find two
armored Israeli bulldozers knocking down a building that
was used as cover for a smuggling tunnel.

The Rafah school is pockmarked by heavy-caliber bullets,

many of which date from a memorable firefight in which the
armed men of the refugee camps established positions there.

"Here was a tunnel," the mayor says, pointing to a

flattened pile of rubble. On a wall nearby is English-
language graffiti memorializing "Rachel who came to Rafah
to protect our camp," a reference to Rachel Corrie, an
American volunteer who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer
in March of 2003 when she attempted to prevent a house from
being demolished. Next to the graffiti about Corrie is the
word "Fuck."

Zourub remembers the day when Abu Ammar made his triumphant
entry into Gaza, in 1994.

"My son asks me on that day, 'Baba, why did Abu Ammar come
back here?'" Zourub tells me, as we drive through the
ruined streets of his city. "I tell him, 'Abu Ammar came to
make things better for the people.' Now, when Abu Ammar
dies, he tells me, 'Baba, you are a big liar. Abu Ammar
failed to achieve anything.'"

The mayor eases his 4x4 around a corner, as if the machine

can delicately sense danger. We stop, and a large group of
men gather around the mayor's vehicle to complain that a
tank has destroyed a manhole. A man in a tan sweater and a
black jacket rides his bicycle past, followed by a man in a
donkey cart.
The drive back to Gaza City takes four and a half hours. I
spend the night in a luxury hotel by the beach, a short
walk from the four-story multimillion-dollar villa
constructed by Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, on land
that was designated for use as a public park. The next
morning I meet with Iyad Sarraj, a human-rights activist
and the director of the leading mental-health organization
in Gaza. In the 1980s, during the first intifada, many of
his patients were prisoners who had been tortured by the
Israelis. In the 1990s the prisoners he treated were
victims of torture by the Palestinian Authority's principal
militia, the Preventive Security Service. When Sarraj
complained about the poor state of civil liberties under
President Arafat, he was jailed three times, beaten, and
tortured. A handsome secularist in his forties, he wears a
black-leather motorcycle jacket and smokes constantly
during our interview, which is held in his office
overlooking the Mediterranean. His eyes are tired.

"Palestinians have lost the battle because of their lack of

organization and because they have been captives of
rhetoric and sloganeering rather than actual work," he
says. "I believe that the conflict between the Israelis and
the Palestinians in one way or the other is between
development and underdevelopment, civilization and
backwardness. Israel was established on the rule of law, on
democratization, and certain principles that would advance
Israel, while the Arabs and the Palestinians were waiting
always for the prophet, for the rescuer, for the savior,
the mahdi. Arafat came, and everyone hung their hats on him
without realizing that there is a big gap between the
rescuer and the actual work that needs to be done. This is
where the Palestinians lost again the battle. They lost it
in '48 because of their backwardness, ignorance, and lack
of organization in how to confront the Zionist enemy. They
lost it when they had the chance to build a state, because
the PA was absolutely corrupt and disorganized."

Documents captured by the Israelis give a very detailed

picture of the vast protection racket set up by Arafat and
his henchmen to govern Gaza. At the top of the pyramid were
Arafat and his inner circle. Below them were the Gaza
security chief, Muhammad Dahlan, and the Gaza intelligence
chief, Amin al-Hindi. Dahlan's deputy, Rashid Abu Shabak,
who was responsible for terror attacks on Israelis as well
as for the murder of Palestinians, controlled the Karni
checkpoint, demanding exorbitant bribes for allowing goods
to pass in and out of the Gaza Strip. Dahlan, Shabak, and
the other heads of the Preventive Security Service
apparatus profited from their joint investments with a
businessman named Ihab al-Ashqar. Together they controlled
the Great Arab Company for Investment and Development,
which imported gravel through the Karni checkpoint; the al-
Motawaset Company, which bought gravel from the Great Arab
Company and made cement; and the al-Sheik Zayid
construction project. Large sums of money regularly changed
hands among the partners. Additional sums came directly
from Arafat himself.

"To the brother the Rais, may Allah protect him," wrote
Muhammad Dahlan on January 1, 2001. "Please instruct the
payment of $200,000." Arafat's reply, "Ministry of Finance:
pay $150,000," is duly noted.

The results of this system of payoffs and theft are written

in the rubble fields of Rafah and on the walls and utility
poles of the Jabalya refugee camp, near the Erez crossing.
The flags that flutter over the camp represent the
different Palestinian factions. Green is for Hamas, black
for Islamic Jihad, yellow for Fatah, and red for the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A wall
banner reads HAMAS CONGRATULATES THE ISLAMIC NATION FOR THE
AL-FITR FEAST. Teenage martyrs are everywhere in the camp.
Their solemn, unblinking eyes stare out from commemorative
posters that promise the sweetness of everlasting life and
the sureness of divine vengeance.

My guide, Ismail, is twenty years old, quiet and well-

spoken. With his jean jacket, gelled brown hair, sideburns,
sharp nose, and olive skin, he looks like a singer in a
Latin pop band. He works in a bakery, though he once
dreamed of joining the Preventive Security Service. His
family refused their permission. "The reputation of the
Preventive Security has been destroyed by the Death Group,"
Ismail explains sadly, referring to the notorious unit
headed by an officer named Nabil Tammuz.

As we wait by the Erez checkpoint, three kids pass us on a

donkey cart, laughing and having a wonderful time as they
circumvent the roadblock by going off into the fields,
where cars cannot follow. "The Jeep is nothing compared to
the donkey cart now!" they call out. Since the beginning of
the intifada the price of a donkey-cart ride in Gaza has
more than tripled.
When I ask Ismail if he ever thought of leaving this place,
his watchful face goes slack, and a dreamy look comes into
his eyes. "This is the wish of my life," he answers simply.
As our driver inches forward, a disembodied voice orders in
Hebrew, "Lachzor"—"Go back." Gunfire crackles over our
heads and into the fields. After another forty-five minutes
of waiting I decide to walk across the road, with a friend
who has accompanied me here. We pass a thin gray line of
workers coming out of the Erez industrial area—fewer than a
hundred, in an area that was made for thousands—and then we
stand and wait for an hour and a half or so at the
Palestinian end of the checkpoint, where a gangster with
huge gold-rimmed sunglasses balanced on his long nose is
bringing in a shipment of cars from Israel. A heavy-caliber
Israeli gun opens up over the road, pumping jackhammer
bursts into the fields.

"Night fire," my companion explains. "They are keeping the

barrels warm." As I trudge through the dark, echoing tunnel
that leads back to Israel, I pass two Arab boys arguing
over money. "You stole three shekels," one says. "I am not
a thief!" his friend answers. The next evening a suicide
squad attacks the guard post, and three attackers die. When
I come back to Gaza, everything is the same, except for a
ten-foot hole and a new pile of rubble.

THE PROFESSIONALS

Absent the formal police-state structure that existed in

Iraq and still exists in Syria, the reality of Palestin-
ian social and political life under Arafat can best be
described not as totalitarian but, rather, as an extreme
kind of political narcissism, in which millions of people
were reduced to tokens in the fantasy life of the man they
had been educated to think of as their father. Their
willingness to follow the Old Man can be read as a measure
of his charisma, his skill at manipulating people, the
depth of Palestinian despair, or the larger sickness of
Arab politics. Yet it is also a fact that Arafat would not
have survived for longer than a few months if not for the
men of the security services who planted and debriefed
informers, conducted interrogations, and maintained the
vast storehouses of information that were the foundation of
his rule.

The new headquarters of Tawfiq Tirawi, Arafat's favorite

spymaster, are located in a Palestinian Authority building
in Ramallah; the sign outside proclaims an affiliation with
the ministry that handles construction. The parking lot is
guarded by men in uniform. I am quickly ushered inside the
building, where a guard takes my passport before he lets me
get on the elevator. I ascend in the company of a pair of
guards, who lead me out to a floor of the building that
appears to be empty. One of the guards opens a door and
leads me down a hallway to an open room that is filled with
women sitting at computer terminals, where I am offered a
chair. A parrot chirps in the corner as a girl in careful
makeup and bright hijab enters data into a brand-new
computer. The spymaster's outer office is quiet and well
run, and shows few signs of the goldbricking and
placeholding that characterize the more public functions of
the Palestinian Authority.

Tirawi's title during Arafat's lifetime was head of the

General Intelligence Service in the West Bank. While the
general secretary of Fatah in the West Bank, Marwan
Barghouti, led the intifada in the field, Tirawi provided
the professional planning and staff required to launch
terror attacks that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians,
and received detailed reports about the individuals and
organizations involved through a network headed by his
deputy, Haj Ismail Jabir.

After waiting for about half an hour, my translator and I

are ushered down a long corridor, past a security door, and
through a windowless conference room filled with brand-new
imported office furniture still encapsulated in amniotic
plastic sacs. We walk through a security door, into another
empty office, and then through a second security door,
which opens on to a quiet, light-filled office, where
Tirawi sits at his desk and speaks softly into a cell
phone. "La, la, la, la, la," he answers, nodding his head
in assent.

His potbelly grown a bit larger after the years of his

confinement in the Muqata, Tawfiq Tirawi is a calm,
meditative presence who speaks in the unhurried,
deliberative voice of a professional interrogator. He is
well dressed, in expensive casual European clothes—a white-
cashmere turtleneck under a tan jacket, and wool trousers
that ride up over his stomach. His black hair is shot
through with gray. He speaks with his hands clasped just
below his sternum, over the buckle of his brown-leather
Gucci belt. Abu Ammar, he explains, was an abqari, a
genius, with a thirst for small details.

"He had a computer up here," he says, tapping his head with

his index finger when I ask him what kinds of details his
master particularly liked to know. "All the information,"
he says. "Including the most personal information. And not
only regarding political rivals, but everybody—he will love
to know this kind of personal information."

Our conversation is interrupted by the gentle ring of his

cell phone, and Tirawi speaks for a while, issuing clear,
simple orders. Arabic headlines scroll by in silence on a
large TV set tuned to al-Jazeera. After a few minutes he
turns back to our conversation. He was nineteen or twenty
when he first met the Old Man, at a guerrilla base in
Jordan. The Old Man had only two suits. "And he had two
kaffiyas," Tirawi adds. "Sometimes he would wear the
kaffiya around his neck instead, especially in winter when
it was very cold. But he got used to it, so then he started
wearing it on his head in winter and summer. He never wore
cologne."

I ask Tirawi to describe the way that Arafat dealt with his
political allies and his rivals within the Palestinian
national movement.

"Many times, with the members of the executive committee,

this is the impression he gave them—that he was their
father, even if they were older than he was," Tirawi says.
"He had those two important positions, of being the father,
of embracing everybody, and gathering them around him, and
then, when it came to a time of decision, he was the
leader. Sometimes he would get mad at somebody, and he
would say something that made them upset, and then
directly, the next day, he would be coming to them, kissing
them and saying that he was sorry, and giving them the
impression that he was apologizing to them."

When I ask Tirawi how the second intifada started, he

initially denies that Arafat was responsible. "It was a
popular movement, because Israel was not respecting the
agreements," Tirawi says. When I press him further, he says
that there was in fact a decision to launch a war against
the Israelis. "After tens of Palestinians were killed by
the Israeli army—that was how it started," Tirawi says,
amplifying his original statement. "There was not any use
of weapons at the beginning of the intifada. Only after—
even after a hundred Palestinians were killed, there was
not one bullet. After that, there was a decision. But only
after more than a hundred Palestinians were killed."

Having established himself in bunkerlike circumstances

inside the Muqata, Arafat expressed a great deal of
frustration with the lack of support he received from Arab
leaders who made ritual obeisance to the justice of the
Palestinian cause. "Many times he would be pushing the Arab
leaders to move, not to wait, especially when he was
besieged," Tirawi remembers in his mellow voice, as the sun
streams through the plate-glass windows, which overlook the
hills around Ramallah. "He would look at those Arab leaders
with great bitterness, because they were impotent, they
could not do anything."

When I ask Tirawi to name Arafat's greatest failure, he is

blunt. "He failed to realize his dream and the dream of his
people of establishing a state."

The members of Fatah's young guard who achieved a measure

of real political power in Arafat's court were the heads of
the security services in the West Bank and Gaza, Jibril
Rajoub and Muhammad Dahlan. Both men had become close to
Arafat in Tunis after they were deported by the Israelis
during the first intifada, in the eighties. Both men forged
close operational ties to the CIA during the nineties. The
theory then was that the United States and Israel needed to
help train and strengthen Arafat's security services, so
that the Palestinian leader could crack down on Hamas and
Islamic Jihad. Rajoub's relationship with the CIA came to
an end in 2001, when an explosive projectile damaged the
bathroom of his heavily secured compound, which the
Israelis claimed was being used as a hideout for
terrorists. The Israelis then demolished the compound.

Muhammad Dahlan, also known as Abu Fathi, is the crown

prince of Gaza. Well-built, in his mid-forties, Dahlan has
an easy, powerful physical presence that exudes authority
and a not inconsiderable amount of egotism and vanity.
Where Rajoub looks like a colonel in civilian clothing,
Dahlan is a fawn-eyed fashion plate. His hair is crimped
with a wave in front, like an Egyptian pop star's. Dahlan
is widely seen as the power behind Mahmoud Abbas's
government and the paramount warlord in the Palestinian
territories. He is the linchpin for the Bush
administration's hopes for democracy in the Palestinian
Authority. When I arrive at his floor in the Grand Park
Hotel in Ramallah, I am greeted by a bodyguard, who escorts
me past three armed men to his room. Today Dahlan is
wearing alligator loafers, a silk turtleneck, a Gucci
blazer, and a large Rolex watch. Beside the couch where he
sits is a stack of Arabic translations of articles from the
world's major newspapers. Dahlan, who was first introduced
to Arafat by Abu Jihad, in Baghdad, is pleased that I
recognize his mentor's name.

"When we lost Abu Jihad, we lost the political know-how,"

he says. "With Abu Iyad, we lost the creativity and ability
to shape opinion." Dahlan takes a sip of his tea and leans
forward. "I believe that the internal life of the
Palestinian national movement became much more complicated
when Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad died, because we had only one
person in charge," he explains. "If you disagree with Abu
Ammar, you become with the Jews. Whereas before, if you
opposed Abu Ammar, it meant that you could be with Abu
Jihad or Abu Iyad."

Like Rajoub, who was close to Arafat in Tunis, Dahlan was

horrified by the Palestinian leadership's ignorance of the
actual conditions in the territories and the nature of the
Israeli state. "It was a horrible shock," he says. "They
didn't know anything, nothing essential, the details or
even the important aspects of the situation. Because I was
used to Abu Jihad, who knew even the smallest details about
who was who in this refugee camp, in that school, in this
university, in Bir Zeit University, in Jabalya refugee
camp, I assumed that the rest were like him. When I became
in the forefront after Abu Jihad died, I realized that they
knew nothing. I was astonished and I was saddened."

"Arafat is your friend, as long as you're not a threat to

him, or a competitor, based on his perception," Dahlan
says. In the last year of Arafat's life, he adds, the
relationship between them cooled. "It's not you, it's not
logic," he explains. "Sometimes he would get scared of you.
He would get jealous of you. You don't know why. It would
just start in his mind, from the people around him," Dahlan
says, leaning forward and squirting a decongestant spray
into his nose from a white-plastic bottle.

"Working with him in general is not easy, even for people

like me," Dahlan continues. Echoing comments made to me by
Tirawi and Rajoub, he paints a picture of a highly
emotional man who was expert in manipulating those around
him but was also susceptible to the manipulations of his
court.

"Many times he would be like a kid," Dahlan remembers.

"Sometimes he is shouting, or sobbing, and other times he
is very calm. I remember him laughing when we were telling
him jokes, especially when we were in the airplane
together. I remember him when he was angry, especially
during the elections, the negotiations, when he was
planning. He had highly refined human emotions, very
sensitive. He is very shy—maybe this is something that will
shock you. Anytime someone was coming with any wish, he
would want to fulfill it. This created problems for us."

In one case, early on in the Oslo process, Dahlan says, he

remembers being alone with Arafat when Prime Minister Rabin
called the Palestinian leader on the phone and asked to
change a key point in the Oslo agreement. Arafat agreed on
the spot.

"He thought it was the fish market," Dahlan adds.

My translator N. asks if he saw the recent editorial

headline in the newspaper al-Ayyam that said "Arafat Makes
Decisions From the Grave."

"That's shit and garbage," Dahlan says.

When I ask him for his final verdict on Arafat's mistakes,

he is openly dismissive.

"He managed the relationship with the U.S. the way he

manages relations with the Arab countries and the Third
World countries," Dahlan begins. "Second, he didn't
distinguish between a personal relationship and a political
one." Dahlan pauses before he completes the list. "And the
third thing, which is also important, he thought he was as
powerful as the Jews in the U.S. He overestimated himself.
In my view, my interest lies with the U.S. My duty is how
to create an interest for the U.S. with me, so that they
will serve me."

THE ISRAELIS
In the weeks that follow, I ditch my translators and travel
to Tel Aviv for on- and off-the-record meetings with
present and former high-ranking Israeli officials,
including officers of various intelligence services who had
dealings with Arafat. Both the Israelis and the
Palestinians know their enemy well. They share other
things, too, such as their taste in interior décor. During
one meeting in the Kirya, the army command headquarters in
the center of Tel Aviv, I notice that the view from my
host's corner office is similar to the view from Tawfiq
Tirawi's office. Again, the television is tuned to al-
Jazeera with the sound turned off. Looking around the room,
I notice a picture of the Mosque of Omar above the walls of
Jerusalem. It's almost the same office, I comment to my
host, who smiles apologetically. "But my view is nicer," he
says. "I see the ocean."

A current high-ranking officer in the Israeli intelligence

services: "Let me tell you a story. In 1997 Arafat was
unhappy with Netanyahu, so in March he decided to resume
what we call the green light for attacks. Since early 1996
he had the red light. So he had a meeting with the Hamas
leadership, and he said something about the fact that they
are always in holy war. Hamas came out of this meeting and
they weren't sure if Arafat really meant for them to resume
the attacks. So they asked him to give them a sign. He
released from jail Ibrahim Maqadma. The story with Maqadma
is that he had been in charge of the secret cell in Hamas
that was in charge of getting rid of Arafat. So by
releasing him, you give them a green light. On the twenty-
first of March, 1997, they carried out the attack on the
café in Tel Aviv. That is what we mean by the green light
for terror."

A former leader of the Israeli security services who met

with Arafat many times: "He accepted that in his lifetime
he would not see a Palestinian state that included the land
beyond the 1967 borders. 'In his lifetime' is a key phrase
on our side also. We also believe that all the land is
ours. If the Palestinians were weak enough, we would take
Hebron and Nablus and sit there forever, because that is
the biblical heartland of Israel. Arafat woke up every day
and imagined what is possible today, and that is the mark
of a pragmatic person. When the intifada came, he rode the
horse. I used to tell my people, just because you see a man
sitting on top of the horse, it doesn't mean he is telling
the horse where it should go."
Amos Gilad, the chief of Israeli military intelligence's
research section during the late 1990s, who authored a
classified report titled "2000, the Year of Decision—The
Coming Terror War Against Israel": "He loved smoke and
blood and ruins. This is where he felt most comfortable. He
believed that Israel was a temporary entity. To talk about
him as a pragmatic person is utter nonsense. His goal was
to destroy us, and he almost succeeded. He wanted to ride
on his horse up to heaven."

Former prime minister Ehud Barak is a unique figure in

Israeli political life, because he is hated with equal
intensity by the left and the right. Israelis hate Barak
because he killed their dreams. Barak killed the dream of
Greater Israel by offering to give up all of Gaza and all
but a single-digit percentage of the West Bank, and to
divide Jerusalem. Barak killed the dream of peace by
failing to reach an agreement with the Palestinians at Camp
David. The most decorated combat veteran in the history of
the State of Israel, Barak is the country's prodigal son,
the leader to whom it turned in 1999 with high
expectations, and from whom it received the bitter harvest
of the al-Aqsa intifada. The popular feeling about Barak is
best summed up by a joke I saw on the Israeli sketch-comedy
show Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country). "Following the
appearance of locusts this week in southern Israel," the
show's anchor intoned, "experts are warning the public to
be on the lookout for creatures that appear, wreak havoc,
and leave quickly." The camera then cut to a picture of
Barak.

I meet Barak in a Tel Aviv coffee shop called Aroma.

Barak's security man arrives early, and asks me to move to
another table so that he can position Barak close to an
exit, with his back against a solid stone wall, facing
outward. When Barak arrives, he asks me to change seats, so
that he can sit facing the wall. Not yet comfortable, he
props his feet up on a chair. A fluent storyteller, Barak
is also a skilled classical pianist, a gifted
mathematician, and an amateur mechanic who likes to relax
by taking objects apart and putting them back together. His
alert, inquisitive eyes and active features are set in a
round face that carries the beginnings of a double chin.

There is a school of opinion that blames Arafat's personal

hatred of Barak for the intifada. When I try it out on
Barak, he dismisses the idea as irrational; yet as we talk,
it is not hard to see why so many people find him
disconcerting. Barak has two distinct and contradictory
personalities. He combines the hyperactive, engaging manner
of the smartest ten-year-old boy on the planet with a cold,
analytical way of describing events that suggests the
personality of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Oslo, Barak believes, was a political
adventure embarked on by Rabin, who distrusted Arafat but
saw a strategic need to reach a political settlement with
the Palestinians.

"What we had in mind all the time was that if you keep
moving toward a volcanic eruption of violence, as a result
of being unable to stretch reigning over the Palestinians
for another generation, we might end up with a tragedy,"
Barak says, tugging at the collar of his navy windbreaker.
He recalls a meeting at the beginning of the first
intifada, chaired by Rabin, in which the Israeli defense
establishment confronted the nature of the rebellion and
the range of available solutions.

"We had a closed gathering of probably thirty people—the

top brass of the defense ministry—with Rabin, and he
brought several academics to talk about what they believed
they were seeing," Barak remembers. "The first intifada was
then two weeks old. And there was a brilliant presentation
made by Professor Shamir, and he talked about the fifty
precedents in the last century of such events. He said that
throughout history only three strategies came close to
being successful. None is relevant to our case. The
strategies were extermination, starvation, and mass
transportation. We were targets of extermination and the
Armenians also, but it didn't work. Biafra was starvation,
didn't work. And he analyzed what would happen—it's a
brilliant short presentation."

As chief of the IDF general staff, and later as a minister

in Rabin's cabinet, Barak talked to the prime minister
about the problems with the Oslo Accords very often, he
says. "Many times I would ask Rabin, Why did you give up on
this or that? and he would say, 'You know, Ehud, we still
have wide enough margins. The moment will inevitably come
when we'll have to pass our judgment.' Even at the time, we
read Arafat's speeches to other audiences, in Johannesburg
and other places, where he would say, 'Remember the false
Hudna,'" Barak says, referring to a deceptive treaty
entered into by the prophet Muhammad. By the time he became
prime minister, Barak says, he found that a violent
explosion was imminent and the strategic situation was not
in Israel's favor.

"I felt in all my mature life that Israel from 1947 on

could never materialize any operational or military
achievement unless we had two preconditions fulfilled," he
explains. "One, that we occupied the moral high ground in
the world, the other that we kept our internal unity. It
was the case in 1947 exactly because Ben-Gurion was ready
to take an almost impossible international plan and agree
to it, and the Palestinians rejected it. Only the fact that
Ben-Gurion accepted it made it possible for Israel to hold
to the results of the war for fifty-seven years."

"Eight years later we drove into Sinai," he continues, "and

it took three weeks for Ben-Gurion to be thrown out after
he made his messianic announcement to the Knesset about the
founding of the Third Kingdom of Israel. In 1967 we opened
fire but the perception in the world was that they tried to
strangle us, and we enjoyed the moral high ground and
internal unity. In Lebanon we violated this basic rule and
we were unable to hold what we took. I felt if we did not
act quite urgently to create this moment of truth before
Bill Clinton left office, we will have an eruption, and
Israel will be blamed."

I mention to Barak that Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli

national-security adviser, and now the head of MEMRI, a
leading source of translations of Arab-language media into
English, told me of meeting with Barak several times before
he went to Camp David to make his historic peace offer to
Arafat. Each time they met, Carmon said, Barak pressed him
on whether Arafat would accept the deal. Each time, Carmon
said that based on the speeches Arafat was making in
Arabic, the Palestinian leader would insist that the
Israelis hand over the Old City of Jerusalem to serve as
the Palestinian capital.

Even for secular Israelis the idea of surrendering the

historic center of Jerusalem to Arab rule was simply
unthinkable. In order to defuse the strategic threat posed
by the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem, the Israelis needed
to stage a controlled scenario in which they would appear
as peacemakers while Arafat would be bound by his own
rhetoric to refuse their generous offer of a state. There
could be no better master of ceremonies for such a
demonstration than Bill Clinton, the American president who
brought Arafat and Rabin together in 1993 on the White
House lawn. By this account, at least, reports of Barak's
unfriendly behavior at Camp David can be explained by the
fact that the Israeli prime minister was hoping that his
peace proposal would fail.

Many Israelis dismiss the idea that Barak's offer to Arafat

at Camp David was part of any master plan. Still, the
implication is worth considering: the prime minister of
Israel used an American president to knowingly create a
huge diplomatic failure that damaged the international
prestige of the United States in order to extricate his
country from the consequences of Oslo.

"Let me complete one point," Barak says. "Imagine two

firemen who are both running to save a two-family house
from a fire. The other fireman is already a distinguished
one with a Nobel Peace Prize, and all along the way you
don't know if he's the fireman or the pyromaniac. And you
have to attend to both possibilities." He puts his hands
one on top of the other, and then lays them both flat on
the table.

"So yes, I felt the need strategically to create this

moment of truth before the eruption, and before Clinton
leaves."

ARAFAT'S CHILDREN

Wearing a black dress and a fashionable white jacket,

Arafat's dark-haired nine-year-old daughter, Zahwa, stood
with her mother, Suha, and watched as her father's coffin
was loaded on to a plane. "Don't cry, Zahwa," an Egyptian
television announcer intoned as the scene was broadcast on
the day of Yasir Arafat's funeral in Cairo. "Your father
never cried. He was a man of patience and endurance." The
press was naturally eager for a glimpse of the little girl
who might inherit the Palestinian leader's fortune. Yet
Zahwa was not Arafat's only child. Since the early 1970s
Arafat had adopted a number of orphaned children, paying
for their schooling and giving them away at their weddings.
Of all Arafat's far-flung progeny the one to whom he was
probably closest was Raeda Taha, who was adopted by Arafat
when she was eight years old, after the death of her
father, the PFLP and Black September terrorist Ali Taha.
A lively woman in her early forties with a low smoker's
voice, Raeda has sharp features that could be pretty or
ugly, a slightly receding chin, and large, beautiful eyes,
which are set off to great advantage by her white fur coat
and diamond earrings. In 2002, while living in Ramallah,
during Operation Defensive Shield, she decided to write a
book about her father, who hijacked Sabena Flight 517 from
Brussels to Tel Aviv on May 8, 1972, with three
accomplices, and was shot dead by a commando team led by
Ehud Barak.

"I don't care if he died for Palestine or anything else,"

Raeda says, when I meet her at a restaurant on a rainy
night in Ramallah. "He looked like a movie star," she
remembers. "White, perfect teeth, and shining eyes. He was
very young." As a child, Raeda knew that the men who came
discreetly to her parents' apartment in West Beirut to sip
tea were important guests who belonged to a secret world.

"I remember my mother would open the door and I will peek a
little bit and I would look to see who they are," she says,
naming several well-known international terrorists of the
1970s. "I remember Carlos," she says, of the terrorist who
was known as "The Jackal," and who now resides in a French
jail. "He would play with us a little bit. Wadi Hadad used
to come a lot." Wadi Hadad was the inventor of airplane
hijacking as a political weapon; his brother Isad was the
owner of the exclusive girls' school that Raeda attended in
Beirut.

The day Ali Taha left on his final trip, he hugged his
daughters good-bye and promised his wife that this would be
his last trip abroad. When her mother heard the news that a
plane had been hijacked to Tel Aviv, she called her
husband's controller in the PFLP and confessed her fears.
"And he told her, 'Not in your wildest dreams. Just go back
to sleep.'" The next morning Raeda saw her father's picture
on the front page of the newspaper, and took it to the
superintendent of her school.

"I knocked at the door and I went in and I put the

newspaper behind my back and I told him, 'Mr. Hassan, good
morning. I want to ask you a question. What's the meaning
of shahid?' And he said, 'Why are you asking me?' I told
him, 'Just tell me the meaning.' He said, 'The one who dies
for his country.'" Raeda went home, where she found that
her mother had been given tranquilizers. The apartment was
filled with people, who told her that her father was a hero
who had died for Palestine.

"I knew the story by heart," she says. "He did something
very heroic that nobody could do. To take a plane from one
place to another was a big thing to me." Raeda also
remembered the man who had come to her house in disguise
before her father left on his final journey.

"I asked my mother when I was probably ten, or nine. I told

her, 'Mom, I know this man from his mouth. He had this big
mouth, with his lips—you know. She said, 'You're right.'"
On the third day after her father's death the mystery man
showed up at her house again.

"He called my mother and he called all of us, and he said,

'Listen to me carefully what I'm going to tell you now. I
am your father now, and I'll be taking care of you, and you
needn't worry about anything,'" Raeda remembers, taking
another cigarette from the pack on the table. "He said,
'These children are mine from now on, and their father is
my brother, and whatever you dream during the night, I'm
ready to make it come true.'"

Being close to the Old Man was pleasant for a child. He was
small in size, and had small, soft hands. He liked to kiss
Raeda and her three sisters, and play with their hair.

"Your father was a very brave man," the Old Man would say.
"He did something very good for Palestine. Your mommy loves
you very much, and I love you very much, and whenever you
want to see me and whenever you need anything, you can come
and tell me." He asked the girls what they wanted to be
when they grew up.

"I told him, 'I want to become an astronaut,'" Raeda

remembers. "He looked at me; he said, 'Yeah, maybe.' I told
him, 'Like Valentina Tereshkova.' He said, 'Yeah. By the
time we go back to Palestine, probably you will be the
first Palestinian astronaut.'"

Every few months or so throughout their childhood, and on

birthdays, Raeda and her sisters would accompany their
mother to a dingy office where her new father sat behind
his desk, surrounded by his bodyguards. When he saw the
girls, he would stand up and gasp with excitement, and come
out from behind his desk. He would grab the four girls, and
sit next to them, and kiss them, and ask how they were
doing in school. One year, on the birthday of one of
Raeda's sisters, a piano arrived. When Raeda went off to
college in the United States, Arafat paid her tuition. When
she visited him in Tunis, he would feed her ice cream and
boast about her grades.

After she graduated from college, she became his press

secretary. They ate together often.

"He enjoyed a little gossip, just to let you know that he

is normal like you. He would ask me from time to time,
'What about your love life? No love?' I tell him, 'No
love.' 'Why? Life is not beautiful without love, my dear.'
I told him, 'You should say that to yourself,'" Raeda says,
laughing. She taps the ash from her cigarette. "He would
notice if I am wearing something new. 'This is a new bag.
This is a new dress—I haven't seen you wearing it before.'
He likes to get involved in your details, to let you know
that he is normal. And he likes to tell you things about
himself. You know, 'When I was young, I never liked to eat
roheyeh or okra. I never like these two dishes. My big
sister, my oldest sister, used to make me roheyeh and okra
all the time, and I became a freedom fighter just to run
away from her.'" Raeda laughs.

She offers me a cigarette, which I accept in the hope that

it might quiet my bronchitis.

"I'll tell you about the last moments I saw him," she says
finally. "He was lying down like this, you know, and he had
this big smile on him with his training suit, and when he
saw me, he said, 'Ah.'" Raeda sighs. "He said, 'So you
came. How are you, my love? I miss you.' His hand was
white. I was caressing his hand, and then I kissed it, and
then he grabbed my hand with his full strength and he
brought it close to his mouth and he kissed it. He said,
'Don't worry. I'll be fine. Yesterday I wasn't feeling well
at all, but today I am feeling much better.'"

I ask her how many people came to visit Arafat at the end
of his life.

"Very few people coming and going," she remembers, of the

day before Arafat left Ramallah. "I stayed there until
twelve o'clock, and then I told him, 'I wish you a safe
trip, and I'll be waiting for you.' He said, 'Wait for me.
I will come back.' I said good-bye to him and I left, and
he never came back."

EDITOR'S NOTE

An article in the September 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, "In a Ruined
Country: How Yasir Arafat Destroyed Palestine," by David Samuels, made several
references to Mohamed Rachid, a former senior official of the Palestinian
Authority (PA) and the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF). Subsequent to
publication, Mr. Rachid, who declined repeated requests to be interviewed by
Mr. Samuels, contacted the magazine to clarify portions of the article. The
references to Mr. Rachid were intended to illustrate certain claims relating to
the financial structure and activities of the Palestinian Authority and its
late chairman, Yasir Arafat, and not to allege any fraudulent or unlawful
conduct on the part of Mr. Rachid. The article did not state nor intend to
imply that Mr. Rachid transferred PA or PIF funds to his individual account or
used such funds for his personal benefit.